9/20/12

A Brief History of the Internet

A Brief History of the Internet
An anecdotal history of the people and communities that brought about the Internet and the Web
(Last updated 13 September 2012)

A Brief History of the Internet by W alt How e is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a w ork at w w w .w althow e.com. You can also read this history in a Belorussion translation by Bohdan Zograf.

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet. When the late Senator Ted Kennedy heard in 1968 that the pioneering Massachusetts company BBN had won the ARPA contract for an "interface message processor (IMP)," he sent a congratulatory telegram to BBN for their ecumenical spirit in winning the "interfaith message processor" contract. The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract
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RFC's are a means of sharing
walthowe. had to learn to use a very complex system. and Case-Western Reserve U were added. Gore was elected to Congress in 1976. I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
Did Al Gore invent the Internet? According to a CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer.com/navnet/history. and anyone who used it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days. MIT. If the most direct route was not available. and Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica.
Who was the first to use the Internet? Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on ARPANet as he tried to connect to Stanford Research Institute on Oct 29. After that. was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972." Al Gore was not yet in Congress in 1969 when ARPANET started or in 1974 when the term Internet first came into use. The system crashed as he reached the G in LOGIN! The Internet was designed to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the major sites were down. Harvard. RAND. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledge in a paper titled Al Gore and the Internet that Gore has probably done more than any other elected official to support the growth and development of the Internet from the 1970's to the present . Stanford Research Institute. and librarians. 1969. engineers. By January 1971. and the U of Illinois plugged in. whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian. and the University of Utah). Carnegie-Mellon. UCSB. The telnet protocol. were added. scientists. The early Internet was used by computer experts.9/20/12
A Brief History of the Internet
let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA. BBN. Mitre.html 2/8
. In fairness. Stanford. Al Gore said. The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge. By June 1970. enabling logging on to a remote computer. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and address. In months to come. There was nothing friendly about it. routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes. Burroughs. E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. MIT's Lincoln Labs. MA under Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. Cal. NASA/Ames."During my service in the United States Congress. there were far too many to keep listing here.

Newsgroups.. through the web.9/20/12
A Brief History of the Internet
developmental work throughout community. Inc. not very user-friendly at first. followed. it was fascinating to watch a BITNET message we sent as it proceeded from one stop to the
walthowe. joined with Ohio to form a national. and from then on RFC's were available electronically to anyone who had use of the ftp protocol. It was a significant part of the community building that took place on the networks. particularly for e-mail discussion lists. The ftp protocol. an outgrowth of Harvard student Bob Metcalfe's dissertation on "Packet Networks. The Internet matured in the 70's as a result of the TCP/IP architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70's. it linked unix systems around the world. appeared in 1974. later international.com/navnet/history. These listservs and other forms of email discussion lists formed another major element in the community building that was taking place. It was adopted by the Defense Department in 1980 replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP) and universally adopted by 1983. BITNET (Because It's Time Network) connected IBM mainframes around the educational community and the world to provide mail services beginning in 1981. providing a means of exchanging information throughout the world . Kilgour of the Ohio College Library Center (now OCLC. the Southwest states. which are discussion groups focusing on a topic. became available to the world. Usenet was started in 1979 based on UUCP. Gateways were developed to connect BITNET with the Internet and allowed exchange of email. See The History of OCLC Ethernet. The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) was invented in 1978 at Bell Labs. Similarly. enabling file transfers between Internet sites. and many Internet sites took advantage of the availability of newsgroups. The visionary Frederick G. first through telnet or the awkward IBM variant TN3270 and only many years later.) led networking of Ohio libraries during the '60s and '70s." The dissertation was initially rejected by the University for not being analytical enough. Automated catalogs. etc. was published as an RFC in 1973. and the Middle Atlantic states. Libraries began automating and networking their catalogs in the late 1960s independent from ARPA. In times past.html 3/8
. Listserv software was developed for this network and later others. network. since it does not share the use of TCP/IP. While Usenet is not considered as part of the Internet. a protocol for many local networks. In the mid 1970s more regional consortia from New England. It later won acceptance when he added some more equations to it.

it was fairly easy to keep track of the resources of interest that were available. other than library catalogs. created an archiver for ftp sites. Fortunately. found out one day that half the Internet traffic going into Canada from the United States was accessing Archie. developed his Wide Area Information Server (WAIS). computer. But as more and more universities and organizations--and their libraries-. setting rules for its non-commercial government and research uses. We would see it arrive at a site and then see it transmitted along to the next site and the next site and the next. Corp. At about the same time. They maintained their sponsorship for nearly a decade. While the number of sites on the Internet was small.html 4/8
. This software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp sites. which would index the full text of files in a database and allow searches of the files. there were many more Archies available. the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. and telnet were standardized. Thinking Machines maintained pointers to over 600 databases around the world which had been indexed by WAIS. then at Thinking Machines. The pace of life was slower then! In 1986. The commands to search Archie were unix commands. but it did open up use of the Internet to many more people in universities in particular. At its peak. and closed down Archie to outside access. There were several versions with varying degrees of complexity and capability developed. FTP. but the simplest of these were made available to everyone on the nets. They included such things as the full set of
walthowe. and it took some knowledge of unix to use it to its full capability. to index the Internet was created in 1989. It was not easy by today's standards by any means. Other departments besides the libraries. and engineering departments found ways to make good use of the nets--to communicate with colleagues around the world and to share files and resources. by that time. which they named Archie. as Peter Deutsch and Alan Emtage. Brewster Kahle. The first effort. the Internet became harder and harder to track. list their files.9/20/12
A Brief History of the Internet
next along the way to its destination. students at McGill University in Montreal. As the commands for e-mail.connected. and build a searchable index of the software. it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use the nets. McGill University. physics.com/navnet/history. Administrators were concerned that the University was subsidizing such a volume of traffic. There was more and more need for tools to index the resources that were available. which hosted the first Archie.

A debate followed between mainframe adherents and those who believed in smaller systems with client-server architecture. The mainframe adherents "won" the debate initially. Gopher's usability was enhanced much more when the University of Nevada at Reno developed the VERONICA searchable index of gopher menus. He was disgusted when VERONICA and JUGHEAD appeared. It takes no knowledge of unix or computer architecture to use. the first really friendly interface to the Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota.000 gophers around the world. they were given the go-ahead to do a demonstration system. recognizing the need to bring together information about all the telnet-accessible library catalogs on the web. which became the World Wide Web in 1991. which you have been using every time you selected a text link while reading these pages. collecting links and retrieving them for the index. the full documentation of working papers such as RFC's by those developing the Internet's standards. called JUGHEAD (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display).
walthowe. It gave a single place to get information about library catalogs and other telnet resources and how to use them. It was purported to be an acronym for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. who developed Archie. you type or click on a number to select the menu selection you want. The University wanted to develop a simple menu system to access files and information on campus through their local network. The demonstration system was called a gopher after the U of Minnesota mascot--the golden gopher. more popularly known as CERN. and much more. and had nothing to do with the comic strip. and within a few years there were over 10. Similar indexing software was developed for single sites. and it took some effort to learn to use it well. Peter Deutsch.html 5/8
. It was so popular that it was very hard to connect to.9/20/12
A Brief History of the Internet
Usenet Frequently Asked Questions files. proposed a new protocol for information distribution. He maintained it for years. In a gopher system. The gopher proved to be very prolific. always insisted that Archie was short for Archiver. Peter Scott of the University of Saskatchewan. Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.com/navnet/history. and added HyWebCat in 1997 to provide information on web-based catalogs. Like Archie. even though a number of other VERONICA sites were developed to ease the load. its interface was far from intuitive. but since the client-server advocates said they could put up a prototype very quickly. A spider crawled gopher menus around the world. In 1991. brought out his Hytelnet catalog in 1990. as well as other telnet resources. In 1989 another significant event took place in making the nets easier to use. was based on hypertext--a system of embedding links in text to link to other text. This protocol.

Later. it would take 20 minutes for a single page to load. the Library of Congress made available some wonderful graphics of the colorful illustrated Vatican Scrolls. With the slow connections of those days.html 6/8
. and CompuServe came online.com/navnet/history. education. The web was threatened with becoming a mass of unrelated protocols that would require different software for different applications. which produced the most successful graphical type of browser and server until Microsoft declared war and developed its MicroSoft Internet Explorer.
MICHAEL DERTOUZOS 1936-2001 The early days of the web was a confused period as many developers tried to put their personal stamp on ways the web should develop. when independent commercial networks began to grow. Andreessen moved to become the brains behind Netscape Corp. Prodigy.. All pretenses of limitations on commercial use disappeared in May 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone. Since the Internet was initially funded by the government. It then became possible to route traffic across the country from one commercial site to another without passing through the government funded NSFNet Internet backbone. The visionary Michael Dertouzos of MIT's Laboratory for
walthowe. Soon after the graphical browser Mosaic was introduced. AOL. This policy continued until the early 90's. and return and marvel at picture that had filled our screen. it was originally limited to research. Delphi was the first national commercial online service to offer Internet access to its subscribers. Commercial uses were prohibited unless they directly served the goals of research and education. The development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave the protocol its big boost. We would start the download. It opened up an email connection in July 1992 and full Internet service in November 1992. and government uses. go on coffee break. the loss of NSF funding had no appreciable effect on costs.9/20/12
A Brief History of the Internet
Although started before gopher. Since commercial usage was so widespread by this time and educational institutions had been paying their own way for some time. and all traffic relied on commercial networks. it was slower to develop.

Microsoft's success over the past few years has brought court challenges to their dominance. and live auctions. Business models that have worked well are portal sites. NSF funding has moved beyond supporting the backbone and higher educational institutions to building the K-12 and local public library accesses on the one hand. The decline in advertising income spelled doom for many dot. Microsoft's full scale entry into the browser. but the profit margins are slim when price comparisons are so easy. the dot. but the Consortium has ensured that there are common standards present in every browser. Wireless has grown rapidly in the past few years. Online sales have grown rapidly for such products as books and music CDs and computers. businesses entering the Internet arena scrambled to find economic models that work. and public trust in online security is still shaky. A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of high speed connections. and the research on the massive high volume connections on the other.com's encountered good news and bad. 56K modems and the providers who supported them spread widely for a while. but this is the low end now. Services such as Delphi offered free web pages. and a major shakeout and search for better business models took place by the survivors. and Internet Service Provider market completed the major shift over to a commercially based Internet.9/20/12
A Brief History of the Internet
Computer Sciences persuaded Tim Berners-Lee and others to form the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 to promote and develop standards for the Web. But new technologies many times faster. We'll leave it up to you whether you think these battles should be played out in the courts or the marketplace. The release of Windows 98 in June 1998 with the Microsoft browser well integrated into the desktop shows Bill Gates' determination to capitalize on the enormous growth of the Internet. Proprietary plug-ins still abound for the web. Free services supported by advertising shifted some of the direct costs away from the consumer--temporarily. swooping up and down as the new technology companies. and travellers search for the wiwalthowe. such as cablemodems and digital subscriber lines (DSL) are predominant now. such as sound and video except in low quality. AOL's acquisition of Time-Warner was the largest merger in history when it took place and shows the enormous growth of Internet business! The stock market has had a rocky ride. Read Tim Berners-Lee's tribute to Michael Dertouzos. and message boards for community building.coms.
Today.com/navnet/history. 56K is not fast enough to carry multimedia. During this period of enormous growth. that try to provide everything for everybody. server. chat rooms.html 7/8
.